ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

13 years, 5 months ago - Yen Rickeard

If you are cunning this will only need time to set up and act. (Tho' time is money!) There are two simple (in theory) ways.
Green screen or split screen.
With green screen, set up the shot, including the two people talking. The other actors will act the freeze, but you aren't going to use that, it just shows you where and how the talking people are in the shot.
Now go to anywhere with a one colour decor. It is easiest with the chroma green or blue wall, but other colours not found on the face or clothes of the actors will do. Light it so there are no shadows on the background. Position the actors so that they appear the same size position attitude as in the location shot. Shoot the dialogue.
In post key out the background and overlay this shot over a freeze frame of the location.
With split screen ( and this may be easier, cheaper and quicker) work out your scene and camera positions so that there are no people behind your talking actors. Shoot the scene. You can use multiple shots so that there are medium and long shots IF you can get the other actors to maintain a reasonable freeze. Again you won't use this, but it positions them right for the freeze frame.
In post crop your talking actors quite tight. Superimpose this over the freeze frame of the whole scene.
If you are very clever you can set up a second camera angle that will work, especially if you use this for close up, or at least different distance shots.
The green screen will cost you ;- making the uniform background (paint a wall, use taut unwrinkled fabric) lighting it, half a day of crew and main characters.

The second method means a lot of hard thinking before hand, careful position of camera and cast, and an extra hour or two on the shot, depending on how long the talking goes on.
Good luck with it all

13 years, 5 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

Either actors stay very still, or you cheat it with greenscreen (ie film the
foreground action separately from the background). Tempting as the
greenscreen is, you'll have a terrible time getting the lighting to match, and
you'll just have to lock shots off as you will hit problems with tracking.

People freezing - how about just using a megaphone and calling 'freeze in
3...2...1...now!'? It will take some work, but filmmaking does take work.

13 years, 5 months ago - michael wray

we did this relatively cheaply here
http://www.tasscar.co.uk/video.html
basically the actors had to stay very still, our sfx guy took the
clips into afterfx and carefully replaced elements with movement
in like actors gulping, wobbling from other frames using
photoshop/afx. He also created little extra bits like the frozen
smoke and football etc but we kept them to a minimum. it took him
a week and he was there on the 3 day shoot as well which was
really useful otherwise he'd have had loads of extra work in
post=money! so plan carefully, have easy positions for actors to
maintain and add very small effects in to help and it should be
simple. then negotiate a buy out your fx guy/gal.
good luck

13 years, 5 months ago - Benjamin Kent

The amount of work will be strongly related to how you choose to shoot this scene.

For example, if the camera is locked off (or at least on a tripod) and the moving characters are just obscuring what would always be a static background (i.e. not just static because it's frozen in time), you've saved yourself a whole load of work.

Conversely, if you're tracking around the characters who occlude different frozen people as the shot goes on, you've got yourself a much, much more difficult shot (you'd need to track the camera and build 3D models of all your frozen characters).

For example, the two shot in that section of Click would be fairly trivial - it's basically just a case of split screening. Even the over the shoulder shot isn't hard. A decent compositor could do both in a day.

So, for the simple shot, the type of effects person you'll most likely be looking for to do the VFX work will be a compositor. If you want to do the tricky version, you'll need someone with 3D skills. Either way I would strongly advise you to get some kind of VFX supervisor on set (even if it's just the compositor) because if you shoot it wrong you'll just cause yourself no end of trouble later.

Obviously the fees will depend on the number of shots as well.

Hope that helps.